The Evolution of My Decorating Site
Recently, I was remembering the early days of Thrifty Decorating, about five years ago, which in Internet years is like an eternity ago. I had been writing a decorating column (for a Web site I don't want to mention, because I'm not found of it anymore ; ) and was eventually approached by a publisher to write a budget decorating book. After the book was released, I bought the thriftydecorating domain and started up a traditional, static Web site, which I updated monthly with articles written by me and the occasional contributor. I was pretty proud of my electronic baby, and kept the site up for a few years. Then, the work of not only writing the content but redesigning the static pages (and manually adding new ones) each month and keeping the indexes up to date got a little tiring. I gave it up for a while, wrote some articles for other sites and publications, and thought about what Thrifty Decorating should become next.
Then, along came blogging. I'd fiddled around with blogs for years thanks to Blogger.com, but none of my efforts interested me enough to make me stick around for long. I watched as my kid and all her friends started blogs on Xanga, LiveJournal, and eventually MySpace, and thought "hmm. Those darns teenagers might just be onto something." So in January 2006, my beloved Web site evolved into its current incarnation as a blog.
There you have it, the evolution of my labor of decorating love. I've read a few books and hundreds of articles about blogging and blog technology over the past six months, and I'd like to think I've learned a lot. But the fascinating thing about blogging is that it is ever-changing: new features, ideas, technology, and trends pop up daily, and if you're interested in being on top of the trends, you'll be a very very busy blogger indeed. So...what about all those nifty little tools available to bloggers? Do they work? Are they worth the download? I'll fill you in on my favorite tools in my next post. Stay tuned...and have a fabulous week!
